You don’t have to be an online marketing expert to see that more and more people are searching the web on their smartphones than ever before. Just stand at a crosswalk, or in line at your favorite take-out place. However, webpages don’t look the same on your phone as they do on your laptop. In fact, unless website owners take strides to make them mobile-friendly, many sites look downright horrid on a smartphone.
Of course, this has meant that people would do a Google search on their phone, choose a site that looked valuable, and then get peeved when it wouldn’t load properly, or would be difficult to navigate. So, to make sure that their users didn’t get a negative experience using their search engine, Google and other companies started pushing sites to be more mobile-friendly by penalizing those that weren’t in the search rankings.
This push has been coined by online marketers as “Mobilegeddon.”
Mobilegeddon
To continue to improve their users’ experience on their search engines, Google and its competitors pushed websites to cater to mobile users by threatening to hurt its rankings if the site didn’t. The threats started rolling out in 2014, leading webmasters to start thinking of the upcoming deadline – when penalties would start getting levied against non-mobile-friendly sites – as another doomsday.
However, when the penalties started coming out in April 2015, the result was much less extreme than marketers had expected. The massive shakeup in the rankings that most people expected did not come, and life has gone on, more or less, as usual.
While the reasons why Mobilegeddon turned out to be a bust will likely never be known, one factor was probably the extreme amounts of preparation that went into protecting websites. In the months leading up to the imposition of the penalties, webmasters took great strides to make sure that the websites they managed were mobile-friendly, and would therefore avoid these penalties. By doing so, lots of websites survived intact, minimizing the impact of Mobilegeddon.
Protecting Your Law Firm’s Search Rankings
Avoiding search engine penalties, like the one that you could face for having a non-mobile-friendly website, is one of the big roles of search engine optimization (SEO).
Satisfying a search engine’s demand that a site be accessible and useable to mobile web searchers can be done in a variety of ways, from creating an entirely new website specifically for mobile users, to simply making your existing website responsive to a smartphone’s layout.
If your law firm is attracting clients through online marketing and organic search results, then making sure that your site is not being penalized from Mobilegeddon is crucial.